#dhampir revolution when tbh

[gravedangerahead]

I would like to talk about the adultification of marginalized teenagers (and even children), and why you shouldn't claim that having being oppressed, abused, traumatized and/or having had adult responsibilities pushed onto them at a young age makes someone more mature, making it okay for adults in their lives to treat them like they're full adults too.

Preface: There's no such a thing as unproblematic media, something having problematic elements doesn't mean it should be yeeted into a trashcan and has nothing of value to offer. Liking a thing in fiction doesn't mean endorsing it in reality. Fiction can affect reality, and media aimed at young audiences will logically be held to different standards, but no single piece of media is gonna come into your home and brainwash you all by itself. It's more a matter of the work reflecting and then amplifying things that are already part of the culture. Real people are always more important than fictional people and you should treat them accordingly when discussing these things.

However, when arguments used to defend an aspect of a fictional work can be copy-pasted wholesale to defend real situations (and are in fact used for that already), that does bother me. What I'm addressing here is a specific argument I'd like to see retired, because I believe it causes real harm. This is not an attempt to condemn people's tastes, or use real life tragedies as ammunition in fandom drama.

Tw: sexual abuse, racism

Fantastic racism and fictional systems of oppression never have a one-to-one correspondence to real life, but authors necessarily draw from the society they're in and reflect that, consciously or not. If you ever heard that "dystopia is white people saying what if that stuff happened to us" that's why. That means that both the way it's treated in the work and the way we discuss it can have real life implications.

So, what is adultification?

Adultification Can Take Two Essential Forms:

1. A process of socialization, in which children function at a more mature developmental stage because of situational context and necessity, especially in low-resource community environments; and

2. A social or cultural stereotype that is based on how adults perceive children “in the absence of knowledge of children’s behavior and verbalizations. This latter form of adultification, which is based in part on race, is the subject of this report.

Girlhood Interrupted: The Erasure of Black Girls’ Childhood by REBECCA EPSTEIN, JAMILIA J. BLAKE and THALIA GONZÁLEZ- Georgetown Law Center on Poverty and Inequality. Available online for free.

If you haven't read it or need a refresher, Vampire Academy is a YA series where the protagonist, Rose Hathaway, is a half-vampire, being trained to be a Guardian. As a dhampir, her society imposes on her the duty of protecting mortal vampires, the Moroi, against the undead evil vampires, the Strigoi. Rose's best friend, Lissa, is a Moroi princess and she very much wants to be her Guardian and protect her, but throughout the series it is made clear that the treatment of dhampirs is highly unfair. Rose is 17 for a large chunk of the series, and she's forced into a lot of tragic situations, she's an excellent fighter and kills a lot of Strigoi, but not without losing people and suffering trauma.

At a young age, Dhampirs take on immense responsibility, are taught to put their charges' lives ahead of their own, giving up their youth and autonomy. Dhampir girls and women are hypersexualized, exotified and disrespected, being mostly responsible for keeping their species going and looked down on for doing that at the same time.

Of course that specific system of fantasy oppression does not exist. But as you can see in the study quoted above, the phenomenon of adultification is not something that's exclusive to the VA universe. While it might seem very far removed from the reality of teens who have some level of privilege, particularly if they're first worlders, being forced to shoulder adult responsibilities, being denied the formative experiences of a carefree youth, being exposed to extreme violence and even forced to perpetrate it, having to leave home and take care of themselves, and many other traumas and oppressions are the lived reality of a lot of young people.

When those young people are perceived as more adult than they actually are, they are often denied the protection and nourishment they need and deserve due to the adult-like stereotypes assigned to them.

These stereotypical characteristics include sexual maturity, possession of agency to make important life decisions and the ability to be criminally responsible for their conduct.

(E)racing Childhood: Examining the Racialized Construction of Childhood and Innocence in the Treatment of Sexually Exploited Minors by Priscilla A. Ocen,also available online.

Minors who went through extreme circumstances are no less deserving of nurturing and protection than others, and neither are minors belonging to groups who have expectations of maturity pushed onto them, but they are often perceived differently. Trauma can come with a pseudo-maturity, but it doesn't rush you through developmental stages.

Adultification is a form of dehumanization that has very harmful consequences to real people.

One of the most dramatic ways that dhampirs were adultified in the books is the age law, an attempt to lower the age in which they become Guardians to 16, essentially hoping to use teens as living shields and cutting their youth short. Rose's experiences holding her own in fights against Strigoi at age 17 are used to defend the validity of this idea, even though she's horrified by it herself. Rose believes they should have a right to those last years of teenhood, both to prepare and to live.

The discussion around that law never seemed like a far-fetched idea completely detached from the real world to me personally, because around the same time there was an attempt to lower the age of criminal responsibility in my country to 16, which of course involveld a lot of biases around race and class. In fact much of what I expressed in this post comes from being exposed to a decade of debates against reactionaries while I was in school and later studying law, in which experts tried to convince the public that minors are a protected category for a reason, since they are at a different developmental stage, and that the extreme circunstances they might be placed in don't make them adults.

Another big way in which this type of bias harms minors is the perception of sexual maturity.

In the context of the commercial sexual exploitation of children, gendered and racialized biases against Black girls cast them as more mature and thus as possessing more agency over their sexuality than their white counterparts. They are viewed as “street smart,” less dependent on adults, and less vulnerable to adult manipulation or abuse. (Ocen)

While the fandom seems to mostly understand that the age law was wrong, there are some arguments that Rose's circunstances gave her the capacity to consent to a sexual and romantic relationship with her adult instructor that I've seen used by several people now.

I find that very troubling due to the real life implications of these arguments. I'm sure these people are very well meaning, and obviously I don't think anybody was defending all of this, but I don't think there's any way to say "she's mature for her age because she went through a lot" or "her society makes girls like her shoulder a lot of responsibility, and therefore she has a higher ability to consent to sex than other girls her age" that doesn't validate these harmful biases in some way.

Compared to white girls of the same age, survey participants perceive that • Black girls need less nurturing • Black girls need less protection • Black girls need to be supported less • Black girls need to be comforted less • Black girls are more independent • Black girls know more about adult topics • Black girls know more about sex (From the Georgetown Law study)

Some of the people making this argument seem to think that the fantasy racism, adult responsibility and exposure to violence that this character suffers are very far removed from reality, created wholesale for the sake of world building. As exposed above, that isn't the case, there are very real counterparts. And in fact, some other people were directly making the argument using real life examples.

Marginalized or abused people are aways forced to grow up faster and shoulder too much responsibility for their age, and that in no way makes them adults. It makes them more vulnerable to manipulation not less. They not only don't require any less protection, they are the ones who are most likely to be victimized.

Perpetuating the idea that those kids who are in the most vulnerable positions in society, and are forced to somewhat give up their childhood, are more mature and therefore it's okay for grown adults to take advantage of them is a problem.

If anybody actually read all this, thank you very much, and I hope I didn't sound aggressive. It's just a subject I find very important. And I truly don't think shipping something means you endorse it in real life, I just don't like to see that argument spread. Ship what you ship.

Of course fantasy racism isn't the only type that is pertinent to analysis of Rose's character, the word exotic is used to describe her and directly linked to her Turkish heritage quite a lot, but that's a whole other can of worms.

For English language sources those articles I cited are quite good, and there are some good videos I could rec.